Learning

Particularly important when traveling. Your new experiences will matter but your attention will matter more—what will you choose to notice?

Beyond fear, by the way, is a great, straightforward book on security, full of examples and insights. It was interesting to get to read it only until now, when terrorism has been far eclipsed as the crisis of the day by the financial collapse.

I lived for 3 months in Spain. I shared a room with 3 other people in a nice, simple flat in the northeast of Madrid. Less than 10 minutes away walking was a big mall with a cheap hypermarket, my gym, and the local public library. I was very happy.

This is such a great animated explanation of the credit crisis—a success in using new media in the service of clarity. It almost makes me angry of all the sweet hours I spent in the Economist, Answers, Wikipedia wrangling with finance jargon.

It’s also, interestingly, very much in the style —fast pacing, soothing, professional voice, electronic soundtrack, swooshes, a galore of icons, symbols and visual metaphors (that touch of houses as arrows was brilliant!)— of recent nonfiction (!) animations—that famous anti-trusted computing video, EPIC, The Machine...

Jonathan Jarvis is one man to watch…

I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.

Starting to feel more comfortable at Valley events. There aren’t that many of us out there in the web scene and you stumble on the same people over and over, which is great because it’s really starting to feel like a community. Strangers become familiar faces become acquaintances become friends.

I also like how fast being at the center of the web world becomes blase. Suddenly meeting the inventor of the mouse, Amazon’s creator, DHH, or the founders of those cool startups you love becomes just one more day. And it’s not that nonchalance by itself has any merit but that once you get pass the wide-eyed gawking you can actually start being part of that world. One hopes.

I went to Adaptive Path’s 7th birthday party last week and was completely at a loss at what to do. What does one do at a crowded party when the music’s too loud to talk and you don’t know anyone? How do you approach people? I’m new at this being social stuff and this was definitely above level—I couldn’t even start one conversation. Anyway, there were free tacos and the paintings in the gallery where quite cool—I loved the one above (which reminds me a lot of Permutation City).

Boy, how much fun has this book been! Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion emocional en veinte lecciones [review] is exactly what the title implies —an emotional education, a coginitive-behavioral approach to learning to handle your emotions—, I just never thought it would be this much fun.

I stumbled on it combing the city’s book fair for books originally written in Spanish, as has been my custom for the last couple of years. It was a difficult choice, it was pricey ($200 pesos), had too facile a title and yet managed to be intimidating with its 300 pages of dense prose. It apparently lied somewhere between selfhelp and psychotherapy, both of which I dislike. But then its recency (2006), its being written by a Mexican UNAM professor, its initial quote:
its excellent typography (!), its suggestive index and its author being a renowned poet besides a psychologist made me put out.

I’m glad I did. Whatever the book’s merits the best compliment I can give it is that it has changed me, far more deeply that I can tell this close to the reading but I think and feel different ever since.

How not to love a book that manages to be densely precise and technical while still being fresh, humble, and (Mexicanly) casual—always struggling for clarity, for precision.

How not to love a book that manages to delve deep into theory while being chock-full of practical suggestions—always struggling to convince you, to change you.

How not to love a book that suggests buying a pornographic magazine as an exercise in selfcontrol, proposes a condom-buying dare, explains respiratory meditation, entrances you with the stream-of-consciousness of an addict, and finishes lessons by sprinkling a sufi story (the tale of the two brothers) or a beautiful metaphor (“Se como el sandalo que perfuma al hacha que lo hiere” / “Be like sandalwood that perfumes the axe that hurts it.”)?

If you care about selfhelp books this is by far the best I’ve ever read. If you care about psychotherapy this is by far the best I’ve ever read too (no Freudian bullshit!). I earnestly and sincerely recommend it, grab it wherever you can find it.

(I’m personally looking for extra copies to give away but Gandhi doesn’t have it in stock and its editor, Paidos, doesn’t list it online—do drop a message if you find it somewhere).

Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)

Just think of the responsibility, the challenge, the opportunity. One third of the population is still young enough to be natural born digital citizens (see Classmate PC and the OLPC XO laptop), to easily master an international language (whichever one), to be taught about doubt (“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt…”), to receive the best education we can give them…

Remember that character in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, catatonic at page 169 at discovering a quarter million Chinese girls thrust to his care? Well, look around and realize we’ve been given a ship of 1.8 billion souls. Just think of the opportunity.

(Statistic according to the U.S. Census Bureau, international)